Arthur Penn has often been classed—along with Robert Altman, Bob
Rafelson, and Francis Coppola—among the more
"European" American directors. Stylistically, this is true
enough. Penn's films, especially after
Bonnie and Clyde
, tend to be technically experimental, and episodic in structure; their
narrative line is elliptical, under-mining audience expectations with
abrupt shifts in mood and rhythm. Such features can be traced to the
influence of the French New Wave, in particular the early films of
François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, which Penn greatly admired.

In terms of his thematic preoccupations, though, few directors are more
utterly American. Repeatedly, throughout his work, Penn has been concerned
with questioning and re-assessing the myths of his country. His films
reveal a passionate, ironic, intense involvement with the American
experience, and can be seen as an illuminating chart of the
country's moral condition over the past thirty years.
Mickey One
is dark with the unfocused guilt and paranoia of the McCarthyite
hangover, while the stunned horror of the Kennedy assassination
reverberates through
The Chase.
The exhilaration, and the fatal flaws, of the 1960s anti-authoritarian
revolt are reflected in
Bonnie and Clyde
and
Alice's Restaurant. Little Big Man
reworks the trauma of Vietnam, while
Night Moves
is steeped in the disillusioned malaise that pervaded the Watergate era.

As a focus for his perspective on America, Penn often chooses an outsider
group and its relationship with mainstream society. The Indians in
Little Big Man
, the Barrow Gang in
Bonnie and Clyde
, the rustlers in
The Missouri Breaks
, the hippies in
Alice's Restaurant
, the outlaws in
The Left-handed Gun
, are all sympathetically presented as attractive and vital figures,
preferable in many ways to the conventional society which rejects them.
But ultimately they suffer defeat, being infected by the flawed values of
that same society. "A society," Penn has commented,
"has its mirror in its outcasts."

An exceptionally intense, immediate physicality distinguishes
Penn's work. Pain, in his films, unmistakably
hurts
, and tactile sensations are vividly communicated. Often, characters are
conveyed primarily through their bodily actions: how they move, walk, hold
themselves, or use their hands. Violence is a recurrent feature of his
films—notably in
The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde
, and
The Missouri Breaks
—but it is seldom gratuitously introduced, and represents, in
Penn's view, a deeply rooted element in the American character
which has to be acknowledged.

Penn established his reputation as a director with
Bonnie and Clyde
, one of the most significant and influential films of its decade. But
since 1970 he has made only a handful of films, none of them successful at
the box office.
Night Moves
and
The Missouri Breaks
, both poorly received on initial release, now rank among his most subtle
and intriguing movies, and
Four Friends
, though uneven, remains constantly stimulating with its oblique,
elliptical narrative structure.

But since then Penn seems to have lost his way. Neither
Target
, a routine spy thriller, nor
Dead of Winter
, a reworking of Joseph H. Lewis's cult B-movie
My Name Is Julia Ross
, offered material worthy of his distinctive talents.
Penn and Teller Get Killed
, a spoof psycho-killer vehicle for the bad-taste illusionist team, got
few showings outside the festival circuit. Among his few recent
directorial works is
The Portrait
, a solidly crafted adaptation for television of Tina Rowe's
Broadway hit,
Painting Churches.
"It's not that I've drifted away from film,"
Penn told Richard Combs in 1986. "I'm very drawn to film,
but I'm not sure that film is drawn to me." Given the range,
vitality, and sheer unpredictability of his earlier work, the estrangement
is much to be regretted.

—Philip Kemp

User Contributions:

Recently, I viewed "The Missouri Breaks' for the first time, and then viewed "Jeremiah Johnson". I sensed both directors were telling us that death is ever-present, and often devoid of any reason (senseless). They both seemed to say "move on with your life" because death has no value. Do you think that they were dealing with our pain after the killing decade (JFK, RFK, MLK, etc?)